Oakland gang case’s over-the-top argument

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Attorneys for the alleged Norteno gang members accused of terrorizing Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood filed a singularly florid argument last week to a judge who must decide whether to restrict the men’s movements through a preliminary injunction.

The treatise, authored by veteran civil rights attorney Dennis Cunningham, expresses outrage at City Attorney John Russo’s proposed injunction, while skewering its alleged absurdity and casting the accused as pawns within a larger “prison-industrial complex.” Beloved by the defense, the document was somewhat less well-received by Russo’s attorneys, who drafted a more traditional argument saying the men were clearly criminals whose neighbors needed protection.

Here, without further ado, is a smattering of excerpts from the filing. It refers often to the two defendants who have testified in court, Abel Manzo and Javier Quintero, as well as to Douglass Keely, the police gang expert who prepared much of the evidence against the Nortenos. It includes sentences that are so lengthy and ornate as to induce wonder:

Withal, the Court now seems poised, misguidedly we say, to comply with the untoward demand of the police authorities that it hurry and certify the existence of an emergency basis on which to brand this clearly random collection of known and unknown young Chicanos from “the Fruitvale” — whose families are from North of Bakersfield and who, in the grim, mysterious vortex of cultural division and violent youth enmity that besets Mexican-American communities (like others) in California today, are therefore denominated “Nortenos” — as “active members” of a “criminal street gang,” whose very existence, however perennial and engrained, constitutes a “public nuisance” in the Fruitvale community, everywhere; and that it order an Injunction premised on substantial and onerous invasion of the defendants’ fundamental rights, supposedly to abate it.

Here is the defense argument for Manzo, who according to police has friends and family members in the gang, was spotted at a funeral for a slain Norteno, and once wore a memorial T-shirt for another:

This he clearly is not and never was, as he insisted, whatever problems he had in life, or in getting along with his probation officer, or with cops; and whoever he ever said hello to, or knew, or where — and regardless of whether an injunction against others is called for or not. Abel Manzo is not answerable for any actions of others, or his relatives, nor yet for how he may be regarded in the community (or by the police) because of them. His inclusion as a defendant was wrong, and only helps show the impermissible “E.S.P.” element — and the malice — involved in the ginning-up of this lawsuit.

Here is a section on Quintero, who was recently arrested in the middle of an injunction hearing and sentenced to five months for violating his parole. The passage refers to the GPS monitoring he once received, and to an incident in his neighborhood in which he was arrested outside a friend’s shed — a shed filled with guns. Police said Quintero once admitted to being a Norteno.

Javier presents a different question. As he testified, he used to be around the “Untouchables” scene on Harrington Street, whatever it was, and he got in trouble more than once; then he tried to go straight. After the incident with the shed he settled in on parole, with the benign agent (yes, they exist), Williams; and eventually he got a real job — with, lo, benefits! and a chance for advancement; a true rarity — but after eighteen months good, and regardless of them, he was fingered by Keely and suddenly snatched out of his groove and put in the GPS program, under the hard-nose (parole agent) Moreno, and then put into this scandalous case. And then he was selected by the lawyers to exemplify the defendants in the hearing, mostly because he did have a job; and that’s so rare, because — this just in — there are no jobs; especially for those (like so many defendants) who are life-branded as felons.

The defense criticizes what it sees as conflicted efforts to reform the defendants. Some had recently been summoned to a “call-in” meeting and offered social services — a program modeled after a Chicago effort called Ceasefire:

In point of fact the whole “Cease Fire” program was and is arbitrary, opportunistic, and unconscionable, and in truth, only one more mindless component of the giant, morally degenerate “prison-industrial complex,” which operates on a $9 billion-dollar annual basis in this state, and requires a steady supply of black and brown bodies at the gates of the R & R Centers, each month, to feed its gruesome process. At bottom, it is for doing this “work,” of gathering flesh to feed the monster gulag, that the police want the Court here to supply them with “another tool.”

Finally, the defense asks for Manzo and Quintero to be excluded from the injunction:

And Javier’s past, his felony, his two good years on parole, and the efforts and hopes for the future that went into that; then his singling out by Keely & Co. as fodder for the GPS, and the lawsuit — and then by the lawyers as exemplar of the injunction defendants, since he had so clearly “just fade(d) away,” in Keely’s unwittingly apt terminology, from the gang scene; whence he dared to speak out against the cops — all led to disaster, and he is back behind bars. Yet he was “doing everything right,” as he said, and moreover he is clearly no part of any “criminal street gang” causing a public nuisance in the Fruitvale, Keely’s fevers against him notwithstanding. Javier also deserves to be cut loose here, forthwith, and left with his remedies against the cops. And the defense will righteously be left needing new exemplars, to show themselves also “fading away” from the gang thing.